What Are Grammatical Errors In English

University of Bahrain

College of Art

Department of English Language and Literature

Grammatical Errors Committed by Arab Learners of English

By: Funoon Hameed Ahmed

ID: 20100318

Supervisor: Dr. Diana AL Jahromi

Due to: 17th May, 2015

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ABASTRACT

This paper included the most common errors that faced Arab learners of English as a second language. The aim of this analysis is to identify the sources of errors in the use of articles, plurals and prepositions that are frequently committed by Arab learners. The test a piece writing consists of three to four paragraphs to collect as many as possible data of grammatical errors. The test was given

One of the significant study in errors associated with a was done by Bataineh (2005), she was focusing only on the 319 syntactic errors in her data collection (a corpus of tertiary essays) without taking into consideration the spelling errors. The results show 61% of errors were instances of under use:-“Ø-for-a” (46%), “the-for-a” (15%). Over use counted for the rest “a-for-the” (27%) and“a-for-Ø” (8%).

Another study related to inflectional suffix-s/ -es according to Napoli (1996), “productive across an element entire category … not all inflectional morphemes are productive across an entire category,” which means that plural suffix –s attached to nouns but not all types of nouns such as the irregular ones.

Moving to other aspect where Arab learners face serious problems while using prepositions. Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999. 401), mentioned that prepositions in generally caused many problems to learners of L2. According to Delshad (1980), he carried out a contrastive analysis of Persian and English prepositions. The results showed that Iranian learners have hardly use the English prepositions they tended to omit or misuse

In this example where the suffix-s is missing *has many shops and restaurant; in English it is a grammatical rule that if two words were linked by a conjunction it must follow the same pattern (whether if the sentence is singular, plural, past and so on). Although this rule exists in Arabic for example الفتيان والفتيات، الحدائق والمنتزهات , Arab learners often tend to omit the plural suffix and that depend on the learner’s lack of knowledge that lead to this interlingual interference. However, when it came to overgeneralization such as peoples and waters then it became a cease of intralingual with the L2